A WEEK had passed, and the explosion at headquarters was ancient history. The injured detective was making fair progress toward recovery, and in some respects the situation was stagnant.
Elk apparently accepted failure as an inevitability, and seemed, even to his greatest admirer, to be hypnotized into a fatalistic acceptance of the situation. His attitude was a little deceptive. On the sixth day following the explosion, headquarters made a raid upon the cloak-rooms, and again, as Elk had expected, produced from every single terminus parcels office, a brand-new bag with exactly the same equipment as the others had had, except that the Paddington find differed from none of its fellows.
The bags were opened by an Inspector of Explosives, after very careful preliminary tests; but they conta
